But I can say that I became disinterested in piracy when they made getting games more convenient than piracy. When they made using the hardware closer to its full potential part of the default experience. When they got the pricing right for these “premium” but pretty basic features. And of course, personally having the disposable income to afford the content because I would have never been a customer when I was pirating, only an unpaid evangelist of the franchise.
I think this is most of the story.
I mean, it's fun to hack, but a lot of people's ideology about a lot of things go out the window as soon as they have a regular job and can afford to buy regular stuff and see these things as pretty much regular products and services.
Future generations of consoles made that default behavior, and games are released in multiple continents at the same time with their respective localization. American flagship games are now more appealing and engaging than their Japanese counterparts.
Its not just the money.
It's still fun to hack, by the way, I just have less time to do it.
In fact, if they're smart, they'll be fine with it, because it's a form of 'perfect price discrimination'.
That said, the question is to what extent piracy from other areas bleeds into the higher value markets. Which I believe does happens, ergo 'a crack is a crack is a crack' probably.
It's funny because if the cost of getting a 'hack' of a game literally entails buying a 'CD-ROM' and going through the pain of copying it like in the 'old days', which is a small pain but more than many want to bear, it puts a natural bound on the copying/hacking: it will happen a lot in poor countries, less so in rich countries.
But if a hack is 'discovered once', wherever, and then easily exploited everywhere ... not so good.
(Also xbox sales are often very good. I'm ok paying $10-20 (sometimes less!) for games).
I suppose it helps that my backlog is 6 years now; up until last week I was still playing games on 360/ps3.
games seems to loose value rapidly after they are released so some are very affordable.
https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/listen...
That's not true. Many people won’t pay for something if they can get it for free reasonably easy.
Unlike past generations you can't just brute force it with hardware modifications either, the security is so deeply embedded in the SoC now that there's no way to touch it. Without a software exploit you're shit out of luck.
> Every game console since the first Atari was more or less designed to prevent the piracy of games and yet every single game console has been successfully modified to enable piracy. However, this trend has come to an end. Both the Xbox One and the PS4 have now been on the market for close to 6 years, without hackers being able to crack the system to enable piracy or cheating. This is the first time in history that game consoles have lasted this long without being cracked to enable piracy. In this talk, we will discuss how we achieved this for the Xbox One. We will first describe the Xbox security design goals and why it needs to guard against hardware attacks, followed by descriptions of the hardware and software architecture to keep the Xbox secure. This includes details about the custom SoC we built with AMD and how we addressed the fact that all data read from flash, the hard drive, and even DRAM cannot be trusted. We will also discuss the corresponding software changes we made to keep the system and the games secure.